Bob Hessen sent a link to this review, by a political scientist, of a posthumously published book by John Rawls: Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Key paragraphs:

Rawls typically wrote in a gray bureaucratic prose—the style only a lawyer could love. Nevertheless the Editor’s Foreward to the book contains a semiautobiographical fragment from a 1993 essay titled “Some Remarks About My Teaching” in which he stresses two features of his pedagogy. The first was to try understand [sic] the great thinkers as they understood themselves, not to impose our contemporary preconceptions and concerns on them but “to pose their philosophical problems as they saw them, given what their understanding of the state of moral and political philosophy then was.”

The second feature was always to make the strongest possible case for the figures he was reading. A sign of his generosity as a reader was a favorite adage of his quoted from John Stuart Mill: “A doctrine is not judged at all until it is judged in its best form.” To achieve this end, he writes, “I always assumed that the writers we were studying were always much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the student’s time by studying them?” One learns how to do moral and political philosophy by studying its greatest “exemplars” and not contemporary figures who are likely to be derivative and second-rate.

It speaks well of Rawls that we continue to study him.